Social Marketing Conversations

This is the final episode of the interview with Aaron Newman, co-founder of Techrigy, developers of the SM2 monitoring tool and Mike Talbot, co-founder of Alterian, which acquired Techrigy in 2009 to round out it’s offering of media monitoring tools to include social media – smart move that one.

In this episode, we conclude the interview and explore the ability of SM2 to be able to detect the sentiment and tonality of a social media mention as it is picked up by SM2 and how the tool can be ‘educated’ to provide better and more consistent results. 

Can the computer really understand tone and sentiment though? As Aaron has said in a previous episode, it’s more of an art than a science right now, but that is primarily because the nuances of human communications are more subtle than the system can understand. 

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Lon Safko, Guy Powell and I all wish you a very Happy Holiday Season, hope that your 2009 Christmas was enjoyable and that your 2010 New Year celebration is both safe and relaxing.  We too are getting ready to launch a new year here at TheSocialMediaBible.com and undertake an even more extensive library of content revolving around social media for business, business marketing a and media.

In this episode of the ROI of Social Media Series, we explore the question of assessing Sentimentality and Tonality in social media, an area that as Aaron reminds us, is still more of an art than a science.

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Marketing has historically had difficulty in establishing a ‘hard’ ROI, that is by virtue of what many business people use as ROI.

A commonly used metric is called ‘Advertising Value Equivalence’ which attempts to establish a value for a news article or print interview by comparing the value of the article to an advertisement, an ad equivalent. (note – it is not uncommon to see this term alternately used as “Equivalent Advertising Value” or abbreviated as some combination of the letters i.e.; ‘EAV’, ‘AEV’, ‘AVE’, etc.)

In this episode, Guy poses the question about using ad equivalence as a metric in social media.  Aaron responds and cites how we’ve become almost immune to a broadcast media message anymore and that we, as a culture, are seeking more pertinent input from the community.

Social Media is at it’s core a ‘word-of-mouth’ tactic, but the technology underpinnings have extended the community to a global scope.  Andrew cites that the trust level of the community has evolved to be a more significant influencer than the marketing message constructed by the marketer.

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Part three of the interview with Mike Talbot and Aaron Newman of Alterian SM2 finds us discussion the topic of how do you value a social media mention.

If social media is going to be an additional tool in the marketers toolbox, the simple mention of the brand will have some value to it – repeated mentions by the same person might have you classify them as an ‘Brand Advocate’ and worthy of special treatment, depending on what they say of course.

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“Why should I invest in social media, it’s all free and it’s just a fad right?!”

These are words that social media specialist and consultants hear from business people exploring as to why they should make ANY investment in social media.  It’s a fair question.

I also hear often enough a comment that goes something like this – (for a large business) “…our marketing intern just opened us up a Twitter account.  We’re going to see how that goes before we invest anything else”, or (for a small business) “…my <insert young family person pronoun here> has a Facebook account, I think they can handle that for us.”

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This is the second interview in the ROI of Social Media podcasts series.  In this episode we feature the co-founder of Alterian, Mike Talbot and the VP and co-founder of Techrigy, which was acquired by Alterian in July of 2009, primarily for their social media monitoring tool, SM2.

We’re doing this interview to explore how the social media industry views social media ROI and whether or not it is a measurable function.  Guy Powell, my collaborator in the podcast, is the author of ‘Marketing Calculator: measuring and managing the return on marketing investment’, who has made a study of the ROI question in marketing and now, in collaboration with yours truly, is bringing his knowledge to the question of ROI in Social Media.

What Guy and I are finding in our interactions is that the ROI of the two worlds, traditional marketing and social media marketing, are still very different.  We are exploring the question with an open mind, documenting our findings, producing content for you our audience and as we can, we’ll share our conclusions about this burgeoning subject.

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